Daphne

Let’s be honest, it’s a scary, unsettling time in the world. Like most folk I struggle at times with worries for the future, feeling helpless and sometimes a big dollop of rage too. I think I actually prefer the rage to the blues! Writing always helps as it’s a wonderful escape. So does riding my horse. Being present and in the moment is key for me and I am making a big effort to stop doomscrolling on my phone. I've been focusing on finding ways to cope that feel calm:

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A moment of inspiration…

I recently took a quiet walk on the beach that turned into something a little more reflective. It sparked a piece of writing, inspired by this landscape and its literary past. There's a small fisherman's huer here that was once the bolt hole of another Cornwall based author ...

Writing this felt like stepping into a thread of something timeless, a sense of continuity between stories then and now.

I hope you enjoy it.

It’s a shiver of a morning and so early that the cows in the field at the head of the cliff path are sleeping. They barely look up as I pass, soft breath rising like incense in the cold air, and even the birds are still yawning and clearing their throats before starting to sing.

This is the time to visit the cove. A moment where scoured light captures every moment in time and where thought shimmers like a mirage before drifting away with the last wisps of night. Secret creatures of the night recede. A pale yolk of sun unwinds the day, casting off bandaging clouds of peach and rose and Air Force blue, and the wild garlic edging the path fills the air with the aroma of Parisian restaurants, summonsing memories of traffic and cathedrals and crowded pavement cafes – images at odds with the peace and space unfolding before me.

 The path switchbacks down to the cove, wet with dew and each blade of grass

trapping trembling diamonds which scatter when my legs brush them. Fine spider’s webs snap. Nature’s art installation created just for me and existing only until I pass. I wish I could capture and keep it and even as I walk, I’m already nostalgic. Do the newly arrived swallows which rise in spirals then dip low, their wings skimming the hedgerows, long for Africa? Does the sand miss the sea when the tide ebbs? Or do they celebrate and revel in each change?

I walk along the tide line, the bleary-eyed sun slanting peach stripes across the damp shingle. The tide is out, the sea pulled far back, revealing naked sand and pebbles which blush in the dawn. The bereft shore ripples silver and ochre. My boots leave soft prints in the damp shingle which fill with water, brine nursing the memory of waves, and beneath my feet are the soft corrugations of what came before. The sky melts into a pale blue, streaked with fine clouds like brushstrokes. A painting of promise.

Snuggled into the cliff, and within a wing tip’s reach of gulls, a fisherman’s huer is tucked into this curve of the coast. Its salt-smudged windows blink at the blade bright sea. Once the writing retreat of a famous author, her tales of pirates, vengeful first wives and menacing birds as much a part of this stretch of the coast as the spiteful gorse and crying gulls.

I picture her now standing by the open door with a cigarette held loosely in one hand as she watches the water. A woollen blanket is draped over her shoulders and, like me, she is listening to the suck and hiss of the waves as the light shifts. In my imagination she leans against the door jamb, one hand pushed deep into the pockets of her slacks. Eyes narrowed against the glare, she watches a sailing boat summit the horizon and vanish into memory. The salt wind whispers to her of one such morning long ago when she sailed her own boat up a hidden creek and climbed the path to an ancient church to marry the man she adored. She turns away, heart aching, and thinks once more of picking up her pen…

I blink and she is gone, no more than a ripple in time’s shallows. Her stories remain though, in the trapped sky and the call of the seabirds. The cottage is closed and windows shuttered, eye lids lowered as it dreams of the time when it was a quiet harbour for novels to moor against the storm of domestic minutiae. That time has passed, her page has been turned and the ink of the years is faded, yet this small huer and the view are unchanged. We are both caught in this moment and held by our own time, yet are linked by the gossamer of a place and a moment both new and old.

I turn away and stare across the water. This morning, like the beach, is scrubbed clean. My journey to this point is already consigned to memory and will be given to ink. It reminds me that the old adage is true: all this too will pass. The tide ebbs and flows regardless of the world beyond and without care for policy makers - at home or on distant shores. It cares little for tariffs and tantrums for it will make an Ozymandias of us all.

I peel off my hoody and let the breeze touch bare skin for the first time in months. The air smells green and alive; perhaps seaweed, perhaps the spring. I watch a group of sand pipers dart in and out of the shallows, their legs moving like clockwork, and seagulls bob lazily like Beryl Cook ladies enjoying the waters. The sea is turquoise near the shore, deepening to indigo further out, and entices me to wade in. Only the thought of biting spring cold holds me back and the squelch of a wet socked walk home. The summer will bring sea bathing days; there is no need to hurry. Soon come, as they say in the Caribbean.

Perching on a sun-warmed rock, I close my eyes and raise my face to the warmth, an atavistic act of acknowledgement and sun worship. With one sense deprived, my ears sharpen and I catch the distant chug of a trawler leaving Fowey. Its lugubrious grumble is hemmed by the rhythmic shush of waves greeting land. Somewhere far above, gulls cry. I breathe in, deep and slow. Cornwall is exhaling after a long winter, and I am breathing with it.

I open my eyes and reach for my notebook. The pages flutter in the breeze, and think about how I can drown this moment in amber. Something is waking and I want to catch the shape of it before, like the woman in the doorway, it disappears. Like her, this moment is fleeting and never be seen again.

The Huer in Summer